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BIBLE  HOUSE,  NEW  YORK. 


THE  MOTIVE  POWER  IN 
HOME  MISSIONS. 


BY  REV.  JAMES  BRAND,  OBERLIN,  OHIO. 

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I.  What  is  the  motive  power  in  our  Hotne 
Missionary  Work  ?  We  all  believe  it  must  be  a 
real  power.  A  tremendous  weight  is  to  be  lifted. 
What  power  is  adequate?  Where  does  it  reside? 

Not,  I  reply,  in  amended  organizations.  All 
organization  is  but  the  tool  of  power.  Not  in  the 
liberalism  of  emasculated  doctrines.  Negations 
are  not  a  power.  The  world  needs  a  power. 
Not  in  patriotism.  Patriotism  touches  bottom 
in  no  man’s  soul,  simply  because  country  is  after 
all  not  the  highest  end.  To  maintain  our  Prot¬ 
estant  faith  and  our  Western  civilization,  and  so 
build  up  a  great,  healthy,  homogeneous  people 
delivered  from  the  ulcerous  sores  of  the  oriental 
nations,  is  a  great  motive ;  but  to  the  true  child 
of  God  it  is  only  a  means  to  an  end,  after  all. 
Neither  does  the  power  lie  in  denominational  zeal. 
None  of  these  can  lift  men’s  souls  to  the  sustained, - 
heroic,  God-like  service  of  Home  Missions. 


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What  then  is  the  motive  power?  It  must  be 
the  same  as  in  God,  for  we  are  made  in  God’s 
image.  What  was  the  power  that  moved  God  to 
his  world-mission  ?  It  had  two  grand  elements — 
need  and  love.  The  need,  to  God’s  mind,  was 
not  national  but  human:  not  better  government 
and  more  bread,  but  redemption  from  the  guilt 
and  doom  of  sin.  When  Christ  wept  over  men, 
it  was  not  over  their  need  of  a  homestead  but  of 
virtue.  An  atheist  can  mourn  over  our  pains, 
but  only  God  or  the  man  of  God  laments  over 
our  guilt.  It  was  the  wrath  to  come  that  ap¬ 
palled  Christ.  To  him,  one  lost  soul  was  in 
itself  a  universe  of  woe.  And  here,  even  in  our 
own  land,  there  may  be  forty  millions  unsaved  ! 
So  appalling  is  this  need,  as  Christ  viewed  it,  that 
some  men  have  rushed  distracted  from  its  con¬ 
templation  to  solace  themselves  with  the  forlorn 
hope  that  surely  it  is  too  dreadful  to  be  true.” 
Such  is  the  need. 

Our  danger  is,  that  in  the  working  of  our 
Christian  missions,  we  shall  crowd  it  into  the 
background  and  put  education,  material  develop¬ 
ment,  or  national  stability  as  our  goal,  and  so 
obscure  the  real  reason  for  Christ’s  mission  and 
ours.  * 

The  other  element  is  love.  “  God  so  loved 
the  world,  that  he  gave  his  only  Son.”  Were  it 
not  that  these  words  have  fallen  so  long  on  dead 
hearts  they  would  startle  the  nations  into  wonder¬ 
ing  adoration,  as  they  do  the  angels.  God  so 


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loved  that  he  could  not  bear  this  dropping  of  souls 
into  an  eternity  of  doom ;  and  he  cannot  bear  it 
to-day.  We  talk  about  the  great  “emergency” 
in  our  mission  work.  It  is  because  there  is  an 
emergency  in  the  divine  mind.  God  sees  here 
to-day  probably  fifty- three  millions  of  people, 
increasing  at  the  rate  of  nearly  seven  hundred 
thousand  a  year  by  immigration  alone,  and  only 
one  in  five  a  redeemed  soul  !  It  was  out  of  this 
love  that  the  gospel  itself  was  born.  It  is  this 
that  determines  and  explains  the  very  form  and 
intensity  of  God’s  address  to  men.  It  was  this 
that  found  expression  in  the  out-gushing  compas¬ 
sion  of  Jesus  when  he  saw  “  the  multitudes  as 
sheep  without  a  shepherd,”  and  cried  out  with 
that  deep  cry  which  is  still  echoing  down  the  ages, 
“  the  harvest  truly  is  plenteous  but  the  laborers 
are  few.”  Now  the  fact  with  which  the  Home 
Missionary  Society  has  to  grapple,  is  not  primarily 
that  so  many  diverse  nationalities  are  coming  in 
upon  us  as  to  wreck  our  government  and  our 
Anglo-Saxon  civilization,  but  that  these  millions 
are  perishing  in  their  sins.  The  problem  which 
our  churches  have  on  hand  is  this:  Given  mil¬ 
lions  of  lost  souls  and  a  gospel  adequate  to  save 
them  ;  required — how  to  apply  it.  Nothing  else 
but  this  saving  of  men  from  a  lost  eternity  is  a 
motive  great  enough  to  give  our  mission  work  the 
true  evangelistic  momentum.  Mere  humanitari- 
anism  droops  and  dies  under  the  weight  of  either 
home  or  foreign  missions.  But  this  motive  power 


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of  which:  I  speak,  is  the  winged  messenger  of 
hope.  Look  at  the  sublime  audacity  of  faith 
and  hopefulness  for  man,  exhibited  by  those  who 
came  with  the  story  of  Christ  into  that  hell  of 
rotting  heathenism,  the  Roman  Empire.  The 
greatest  men  had  become  abject.  Simonides  and 
Seneca  and  Pliny  had  concluded  that  the  1  *  aim  of 
philosophy  ”  was  to  teach  men  to  despise  life. 
But  Paul  and  the  Christian  fathers  announced  a 
gospel  of  hope.  The  empire  felt  it,  like  the  first 
thrill  of  returning  life  to  a  putrefying  corpse. 
The  presentation  of  Home  Missionary  geography 
with  its  vast  extent  and  its  spiritual  blight  may 
move  the  mind  for  a  time  with  a  kind  of  moral 
intoxication,  but  our  mission  work  never  puts  on 
its  true  grandeur  till  we  thus  trace  its  origin  to 
the  divine  decree  and  connect  its  progress  with  the 
eternal  years  of  God. 

II.  What  now  is  the  hindrance  in  the  way 
of  an  enlarged  missionary  work  ? 

I  reply,  not  chiefly  the  lack  of  knowledge. 
We  know  more  than  we  feel.  Not  the  lack  of 
material  in  the  churches.  Not  the  lack  of  money. 
Not  the  defective  policy  of  the  American  Home 
Missionary  Society.  That  Society  is  one  of  the 
noblest  and  most  richly  blessed  in  the  world.  Its 
history  is  an  inspiration.  Its  officers  are  hardly 
to  be  matched  for  wisdom,  ability,  and  consecra¬ 
tion,  The  real  hindrance  lies  in  the  lack  of  whole- 
souled  loyalty  to  Christ  among  his  people.  The 


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great  motive  which  moved  God  to  come  into  this 
world  of  sin  and  suffering  has  not  taken  hold  of 
us.  Christ’s  conception  of  the  Christian  life  and 
mission  has  been  but  feebly  grasped  or  not  grasped 
at  all. 

III.  What  then  are  the  duties  of  the  hour  ? 

(1)  The  first  and  most  important  of  all  is  to 
turn  and  hold  attention  to  this  motive  power — 
infinite  need  and  love.  Our  missionary  work 
must  partake  of  the  tremendous  seriousness  which 
lay  upon  the  soul  of  Christ  when  he  came  to  a 
doomed  world  to  pull  souls  out  of  the  fire. 
Gethsemane  !  Calvary  !  must  be  the  watch-words 
of  God’s  missionary  hosts.  Once  here,  and  at 
the  work,  it  was  a  small  thing  to  Christ,  who 
laughed  or  wept,  or  who  drove  the  nails  through 
his  hands  and  feet.  They  must  be  driven. 

(2)  We  must  recognize  and  emphasize  the  ele¬ 
ment  of  time.  God  is  the  author  of  “emergen¬ 
cies.”  There  are  times  when,  historically  viewed, 
God  seems  not  to  be  in  a  hurry.  His  infinite 
benevolence  is  always  guided  by  his  eternal  wis¬ 
dom.  His  compassion  never  leads  him  to  precip¬ 
itate  a  movement  till  all  the  circumstances  are 
ripe  for  the  best  possible  result.  The  cries  and 
tears  and  groans  of  his  people  in  Egypt  did  not 
shorten  the  years  of  Moses’  preparation  for  his 
mission  by  the  space  of  one  hour.  Forty  years 
at  the  court  of  Pharaoh  must  be  followed  by 
forty  more  at  the  “back  side  of  the  desert.” 


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Then  the  people  were  led  out.  As  a  nation  God 
has  kept  us  at  the  “back  side  of  the  desert  ”  for 
more  than  a  hundred  years,  till  at  last  all  things 
are  ready  on  a  gigantic  scale.  God’s  emergency 
is  here.  He  is  now  in  a  hurry.  Hew  settlement, 
foreign  settlement,  unparalleled  rapidity  of  settle¬ 
ment,  godless  settlement, — these  are  facts  unique 
in  our  land,  which  God  is  thrusting  upon  us 
now. 

(3)  We  must  recognize  the  moral  elements  of 
danger  entering  into  the  foundation  of  Western 
Society.  The  antagonism  of  different  nationalities, 
in  their  views  of  religious  duty,  is  one.  The  mil¬ 
lions  are  coming  here,  not  for  religion,  but  for 
liberty  and  bread,  and  they  bring  their  moral 
standards  with  them.  The  threatened  loss  of  the 
Christian  Sabbath  is  another.  The  spirit  of 
Sabbath  desecration,  supported  by  old  world  in¬ 
fidelity  and  new  world  lust  for  gain,  is  laying  its 
foundations  in  all  the  boundless,  plastic  West. 
Then  too,  more  appalling  than  any  other  one 
thing  that  opposes  the  Kingdom  of  Christ,  is  the 
omnipresence,- — I  might  almost  say  the  omnip¬ 
otence — in  this  land,  of  the  Satanic  confederacy 
of  the  liquor  traffic.  It  is  the  one  foe  that 
conspires  openly  against  all  religion  and  all  law 
except  the  “  law  of  sin  and  death.”  It  furnishes 
us  one  fifth  of  our  National  revenue,  and  so  puts 
its  yoke  on  the  nation's  neck.  And  this  gigantic 
defiance,  this  Satanic  confederacy  against  God 
and  virtue,  before  which  political  parties  crouch 


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and  quail  and  bend  the  knee,  has  its  home  and 
foreign  missions  too.  It  is  the  first  on  every 
home  missionary  field,  and  is  laying  its  founda¬ 
tions  for  future  empire  as  well  as  we. 

What  now  is  God’s  message  to  the  churches ? 
Is  it  not  this  :  that  they  are  failing  to  grasp  his 
thought  and  to  appreciate  his  emergency  ?  We 
are  gaining  ground ;  we  are  waking  up ;  but 
we  are  not  waking  up  fast  enough  to  keep  pace 
with  this  mighty  movement  of  God’s  providence. 
We  are  like  Rip  Van  Winkle,  waking  up  after 
miglity  changes  and  trying  to  meet  the  demands 
of  to-day  with  the  supplies  of  twenty  years  ago. 
The  kingdom  of  God  has  but  one  great  hindrance 
in  this  land.  It  is  not  Mormonism,  or  Romanism, 
or  Infidelity — it  is  selfishness  in  the  church  of 
Christ.  Christ  has  not  really  got  the  men,  and 
so  cannot  get  the  money.  When  he  gets  the 
men,  he  will  have  the  money. 

What  is  God's  message  to  the  ministry  ? 
This  :  We,  who  preach  Christ,  standing  as  we  do 
before  this  problem  of  the  world’s  conversion, 
must  take  a  new  position.  We  must  define  con¬ 
version  and  church  membership  aneiu  in  the  light, 
not  of  the  past,  but  of  the  present.  We  must 
make,  in  our  life  and  our  preaching  to  the  church, 
the  parting  with  earthly  goods  for  the  love  of 
Christ,  more  and  more  the  test  of  religion.  If 
we  do  our  duty  in  these  marvelous  days  and  adjust 
ourselves  to  a  great  future,  we  must  preach  more 
and  more  the  principles  and  grandeur  of  mission- 


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ary  work.  Oh,  the  mighty  need  of  large,  unselfish 
Christian  sympathies  ;  of  conquering  faith  ;  of 
deep,  burning  convictions  like  those  of  Jesus;  of 
outflaming  zeal  and  enthusiasm  for  missions  in  all 
the  pulpits  of  this  land  ! 


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